MovieChat Forums > The Letter (1940) Discussion > It's Great Soap Opera

It's Great Soap Opera

posted 19 years ago by rdujack
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Just saw this classic today (12/11/05) for the first time ever. Fortunately, the only review of it that I had ever read was the one by Pauline Kael (who did not give away much of the plot). I was hooked from the beginning, and all the way through to the disappointing hokey end, which, I understand was mandated by the Hays Office. Does anyone know how Maugham's story ended?

Speaking of Maugham. After a few minutes into the film, the cliches that pervade all of Maugham's short stories in that genre (exotic places and ordinary people)began to get to me a bit. Maugham and Hemingway have not worn well I fear. We already have Bad Hemingway contests. Guess it's about time to try Bad Maugham. Letters is really Bad Maugham. But I digress.

Also didn't care for the bogus symbolism of the moon shots -- but, I suppose that such an artifice could be considered relatively avant garde for 1940. You are forgiven, Mr. Wyler.

Davis and the lawyer character, James Stephenson, were superb. How did Gale Sondergaard (one of my favorites from other flicks) manage to get an Academy Award nomination for a role with no speaking lines -- except for those few grunts in pseudo Chinese or Malaysian. All she did was glare and look sinister. I must admit that she looked great in that Dragon Lady drag, but I must also admit that I had to suppress a snicker in her first camera scene, before I could resume suspending disbelief.

[–] creightonhale 18 years ago

I haven't read the play, but I've seen the 1929 version with Jeanne Eagles. It simply ends with Leslie's confession of her continued love for the man she killed and her husband's leaving her after expressing his disgust with her. I'm assuming this version follows the play much more closely since, by necessity of early sound, it remains rather stage-bound.

On a different note, I would have to disagree with your assessment of the film as merely "soap opera." Davis's performance (cool, calculating, coiled), the film's feminist elements, the intelligent direction, its noir elements (even though it precedes true film noir) are a few of the qualities that help it transcend such a category. And since you've read Kael's comments about the film, you know that she called it "very likely the best study of female sexual hypocrasy in film history," which attests to its having more depth than mere soap opera.

In Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (Eds. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward), Blake Lucas says: "Critical complaints have been directed at the closing sequence for being arbitrarily melodramatic. Actually, it was imposed to satisfy code requirements that a murderer must die. But it is precisely this kind of sudden, poetically rendered violence that epitomizes the deterministic fatality of film noir; and, in that respect The Letter's finale is even more interesting than the tracking shot with which Wyler opens the film. The Letter is also noteworthy for the moral shading of its most interesting character, the lawyer, who is simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the murderess. Ambiguous, intensely sympathetic, and thoughtfully realized, the character seems to express the film's true meaning as his reluctant complicity in Leslie's lie leads him to an implied psychological self-destruction. He is a precursor of the countless protagonists destroyed by women in the later classics of the noir cycle." Soap operas don't lend themselves to this kind of analysis.

Also, the code was not as strictly enforced when the 1929 version was made, and the film therefore allowed Leslie's punishment to be little more than a future of unhappiness.

"That was a good movie. You should have been in that movie."